Gerard Depardieu is not the only one who’s unimpressed by French government policy. European fund managers have fingered France as the single biggest risk to Europe in 2013, according to a poll conducted by Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Latvia continues to defy the doomsters who wrote off its austerity strategy. Its latest achievement: the Baltic state is paying off its entire debt of EUR714.3 million to the International Monetary Fund early.

Japan has long been the land of the falling yield. But the European financial crisis, coupled with the European Central Bank’s latest rate cut has seen a host of countries race past Japan to the bottom.

It’s unfortunate that Swiss refiner Petroplus collapsed just in time for Davos’s peculiar festivities. But it should help focus minds on a key issue: not oil, but Europe’s struggling banks.

Petroplus’ bankruptcy filing can be traced to high debt and weak European fuel demand. But the immediate trigger was a demand for early repayment by a group of banks including BNP Paribas and Société Générale.

Traders and analysts have come up with the shorthand phrases “risk-on” and “risk-off” to describe the sometimes violent swings in prices associated with the financial crisis. But investment giant BlackRock” has delved into literature to come up with a more eloquent variant.

On the face of it, the euro zone and the United Arab Emirates do not have a lot in common. But even before Greece triggered the euro crisis by revealing a gargantuan hidden deficit, Dubai had provided an early warning of what was to come with its real-estate bust, which similarly required a bailout from a rich neighbor. But does the UAE experience hold any wider lessons for the euro zone? Morgan Stanley’s economists think so.